Local law enforcement is getting the kind of technological boost that used to be limited to three-letter agencies, thanks to Web-based software services that mine social media for intelligence. At last month's International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP) conference in Philadelphia, LexisNexis showed off a new tool it will bundle with its research service for law enforcement agencies—one that will help them "stake out" social media as part of their criminal investigations.

Called Social Media Monitor, the cloud-based service will watch social networks for comments and activities that might offer clues to crimes in the physical world. With direct connections into a variety of social media services' feeds, it will help police plow through Twitter and Facebook in search of evidence that could lead to arrests.

Social media is already a major tool for police departments. Some city police departments, such as the Boston Police Department, have integrated monitoring of social media into their Real Time Crime Centers (RTCCs)—operations that have been aided by federal funding in a number of large cities. And because criminals often use social media themselves (to their own detriment), social media monitoring is paying off. For example, in 2011 analysts at Cincinnati's RTCC were searching the social network connections of suspects for one crime and found video of an armed robbery posted to a Facebook page by one of the perpetrators.

It’s not just a big city phenomenon. A poll of 1,200 law enforcement officers conducted by LexisNexis found that four out of five law enforcement officers use social media as part of their investigations. More than three-quarters of those who don't use social media now plan to start using it within the next 12 months.

LexisNexis' Accurint for Law Enforcement is already something of a social network of its own. That service is a sort of LinkedIn for law enforcement agents that provides a way to network and identify people with expertise at other levels of law enforcement. It also allows for access to public records about individuals and businesses that law enforcement can use to verify identities, locate suspects and their assets, and discover links between people that may not show up on their Facebook page. The addition of Social Media Monitor adds just another layer of "big data" for investigators to mine.

Social Media Monitor is provided by an Atlanta firm called Digital Stakeout. The software-as-a-service is actually an intelligence database platform built to comply with the Department of Justice's 28 CFR part 23, the federal government's regulations on criminal intelligence information systems. And much like big data analysis systems employed by the NSA and other federal agencies, Digital Stakeout does a lot more than watch for someone to tweet "LOL just robbed a bank YOLO."

Digital Stakeout pulls data and metadata directly from Twitter's "firehose," as well historical data from Twitter. The system taps into Facebook posts and comments, Google+ and YouTube, Instagram, and other social media "big data" feeds. It performs a variety of rules-based processing on the data live from the source—including some proprietary natural language analytics that can look for thousands of combinations of words within feeds that would indicate an emergency, such as a shooting in progress. Digital Stakeout includes sentiment analysis features to monitor the general mood of postings and pick up potential threats of violence. The system can even leverage geographic metadata in posts to allow a variety of searches based on location.

Digital Stakeout isn't alone in its effort to bring social media analytics to law enforcement. The Boston Police Department uses Social Media Command Center, another Web-based application from Catonsville, Maryland-based Inttensity. And other "big data" companies that have specialized in intelligence products for defense and intelligence customers, such as Palantir and BrightPlanet, are now targeting local law enforcement agencies as a new potential pool of customers.

My first thought was, "well as long as it is set to public.". But then I questioned the cost to our aggregate liberty by living in a world where every small town high school dropout cop can monitor the "public" speech of every single American, not to mention everyone else that gets dragged into it.

If law enforcement wanted to record audio and video of everything ever citizen does in public... crap, that analogy fails because in some places they can do that, too. Is it still free speech if you are afraid any thing you ever say can be evidence against you or a loved one?

My first thought was, "well as long as it is set to public.". But then I questioned the cost to our aggregate liberty by living in a world where every small town high school dropout cop can monitor the "public" speech of every single American, not to mention everyone else that gets dragged into it.

If law enforcement wanted to record audio and video of everything ever citizen does in public... crap, that analogy fails because in some places they can do that, too. Is it still free speech if you are afraid any thing you ever say can be evidence against you or a loved one?

I'm disturbed. But then there's that "public" thing...

But this is a step beyond even "happened to be a public place". You have to purposefully post stuff to Twitter and Facebook. It doesn't just happen because you walked through a park.

Public information is public. You want to complain about NSA access to non-public data... there are plenty of threads specific to that issue.

So you're the arbiter of what we can and can't comment about on Ars now, Chuck? Awesome job, man.

I apologize for the tone. Please take it as a suggestion/plea that we talk about the implications of this technology, and not that we devolve into yet another (usually tin-foil-hat filled) discussion of what the NSA is up to using a completely separate set of technologies/court-orders/goals.

(And, for the record, I am against what the NSA is doing. I just get annoyed at how it must pollute every thread about passwords, online security, viruses, law enforcement, etc. Do we need to have a comment about NSA backdoors in every OS discussion, for instance?)

Public information is public. You want to complain about NSA access to non-public data... there are plenty of threads specific to that issue.

So you're the arbiter of what we can and can't comment about on Ars now, Chuck? Awesome job, man.

I apologize for the tone. Please take it as a suggestion/plea that we talk about the implications of this technology, and not that we devolve into yet another (usually tin-foil-hat filled) discussion of what the NSA is up to using a completely separate set of technologies/court-orders/goals.

(And, for the record, I am against what the NSA is doing. I just get annoyed at how it must pollute every thread about passwords, online security, viruses, law enforcement, etc. Do we need to have a comment about NSA backdoors in every OS discussion, for instance?)

I had a big reply typed out decrying the absolutely lack of attention to what really should and should not be posted by people (for their own good) these days in social media, and kinda just threw my arms up in disgust: preaching to the choir (here) would get me nowhere. No need to apologize, I let my frustration at this topic get to me. It isn't about NSA or spying or identity theft or anything else like that: it's about the iGeneration not understanding or giving a crap about what they're doing to the rest of us and to our society in general in their rush to obliterate privacy as we know it.

While part of me sees the reason for all of this another and larger part of me is somewhat disturbed by all this. When are we going to stop this "we've got to watch just in case crime happens" mentality?

I think I truly and deeply understand the line from The Prisoner now: "I am not a number, I am a free man!". Well, not according to law enforcement and the government we're not we're just all criminals-in-waiting to be data-mined down to our toenail clippings and stored in a database somewhere.

Personally, I've felt less safe after 9/11 than I ever did before it happened. >.>

Public information is public. You want to complain about NSA access to non-public data... there are plenty of threads specific to that issue.

So you're the arbiter of what we can and can't comment about on Ars now, Chuck? Awesome job, man.

I apologize for the tone. Please take it as a suggestion/plea that we talk about the implications of this technology, and not that we devolve into yet another (usually tin-foil-hat filled) discussion of what the NSA is up to using a completely separate set of technologies/court-orders/goals.

(And, for the record, I am against what the NSA is doing. I just get annoyed at how it must pollute every thread about passwords, online security, viruses, law enforcement, etc. Do we need to have a comment about NSA backdoors in every OS discussion, for instance?)

I had a big reply typed out decrying the absolutely lack of attention to what really should and should not be posted by people (for their own good) these days in social media, and kinda just threw my arms up in disgust: preaching to the choir (here) would get me nowhere. No need to apologize, I let my frustration at this topic get to me. It isn't about NSA or spying or identity theft or anything else like that: it's about the iGeneration not understanding or giving a crap about what they're doing to the rest of us and to our society in general in their rush to obliterate privacy as we know it.

I'm starting to feel like the iGeneration IS society in general, and those of us who post on these threads are the weird ones. It really feels like a Brave New World¹ out there these days...

Believe me, I don't like it. I hate that I felt paranoid even looking that book up on Amazon.com. But it just seems like there's a huge swath of the population who just don't even care...

Instead of actually going outside they will just find criminal activity on the internet all day.

Leaving the smart criminals that don't put evidence on the internet free to do what they like.

I'm struggling to even think of what crimes they're talking about here. It's all small time drug buyers, right? The guys who tweet at someone "hey you got an oz?"

Surely muggers or people who knock over a liquor store or identity thieves or other similar criminals aren't openly planning online, right?

That's about right. It didn't prevent a white guy being shot in the back by two black guys trying to carjack him right outside the hotel where the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP) conference was going on.

Unless they decide to sue you anyway, in which case you can ruin your finances for the rest of your life trying to prove that you're right...

By actually stating the copyright notice you would weaken your case.

I realize you were doing the copyright thing in jest.

But you see it a lot on the web, people do things that may or may not be copyright infringement and try to get away with it by posting a copyright notice. But that just makes it clear that they were aware of the copyright infringement, making it deliberate.

Unless they decide to sue you anyway, in which case you can ruin your finances for the rest of your life trying to prove that you're right...

By actually stating the copyright notice you would weaken your case.

I realize you were doing the copyright thing in jest.

But you see it a lot on the web, people do things that may or may not be copyright infringement and try to get away with it by posting a copyright notice. But that just makes it clear that they were aware of the copyright infringement, making it deliberate.

I'm not sure I follow your reasoning. I'm under the impression that parody is well-protected under Fair Use laws. If I pretended I didn't know that something was copyrighted, wouldn't that weaken my case?

And yes, I was doing the copyright thing in jest, but I suspect Aldous Huxley wouldn't have felt compelled to take legal action against me, even if my post did somehow violate copyright laws, which I doubt it does. Admittedly, I don't know what the current holders think (or even who they are, to be honest).

No company that's not run by insane people would take legal action against someone, say, painting a loving fan-art version of one of their iconic characters and posting it on the web. Of course they would be within their rights to do so, but it would be incredibly stupid from a PR perspective and could even weaken the value of their IP if enough people got angry about it. And if you're engaging in parody, well, you have a right to do that, even if you don't have enough money to defend yourself for doing so.

Take Penny Arcade vs American Greetings with the whole Strawberry Shortcake thing. They had a right to parody Strawberry Shortcake, but they didn't have the resources to defend that right, so they took the strip down (you can still find it on the web, and I have a copy myself for posterity). On the other hand, they have enough money now that this strip is still up (borders on NSFW):

I wonder if this works with the https://diasporafoundation.org/ ? I don't know much about the project, but since you can host a node yourself, this might be a legitimate way to have your social media and a bit of privacy?

If the police want to use big data techniques to comb publically-available data for references to crimes, I'm fine with that. There's no right to privacy if you post things publically. Frankly, I think that a lot of criminals are dumb enough to brag about crimes they've committed on Twitter.

If the police have a person of interest in a crime and they want to see if that person made any incriminating statements or invalidated an alibi, or if they're trying to locate someone and they use social media to identify that person's associates, also just fine by me.

All of this is just taking policing into the 21st century, so far as I'm concerned.

Now if the police want to look at private information, they need a warrant.

Now if the police want to look at private information, they need a warrant.

What private information?

..such a phrase is now an oxymoron..

"Owner of the information took reasonable measures to prevent the data from being publicly available, or data is inherently sensitive" seems like a reasonable place to start. I'd leave it to people with more legal training and time than me to hammer out exact details.

Now if the police want to look at private information, they need a warrant.

What private information?

..such a phrase is now an oxymoron..

"Owner of the information took reasonable measures to prevent the data from being publicly available, or data is inherently sensitive" seems like a reasonable place to start. I'd leave it to people with more legal training and time than me to hammer out exact details.

Clear violation of your rights and just another fine example of how the government is slowing milking away every word of the constitution while the majority of hippies sit back and allow for it to happen. I didn't spend 10 years in the United States Marine Corps protecting this country just to have it turn around and slowly start transforming into another dictatorship. Police are nothing but paid public servants and nothing more. Who is monitoring them online? The government has more corruption then any one state has criminals and yet, they're allowing civilians that wear a tin badge and play cops and robbers to be in charge of monitoring what you and I say online and decide if it's something they can use to issue a warrant for an arrest? Smart thinking, what's next hacking into everyone's cell phones and listening to see if you might catch a call about a crime? Oh wait you already do that. Preventing crime is one thing, but clearly over stepping the boundaries is another. Giving this kind of power to incompetent idiots is classic.

Clear violation of your rights and just another fine example of how the government is slowing milking away every word of the constitution while the majority of hippies sit back and allow for it to happen. I didn't spend 10 years in the United States Marine Corps protecting this country just to have it turn around and slowly start transforming into another dictatorship. Police are nothing but paid public servants and nothing more. Who is monitoring them online? The government has more corruption then any one state has criminals and yet, they're allowing civilians that wear a tin badge and play cops and robbers to be in charge of monitoring what you and I say online and decide if it's something they can use to issue a warrant for an arrest? Smart thinking, what's next hacking into everyone's cell phones and listening to see if you might catch a call about a crime? Oh wait you already do that. Preventing crime is one thing, but clearly over stepping the boundaries is another. Giving this kind of power to incompetent idiots is classic.

Exactly how is it a clear violation of our rights? If it's so clear, you should be able to pretty easily explain it.

Surely muggers or people who knock over a liquor store or identity thieves or other similar criminals aren't openly planning online, right?

Perhaps their not planning, but are bragging about it.

True story:

Kids commit robbery / murder. Kids brag about it at school. District Attorney's kid tell dad, dad tells sheriff, deputies arrest kids involved in crime. All occurred before Facebook, Twitter and others, but not before the grapevine. Criminals will talk police will listen. This particular story occurred in 1985.